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Proving The Value Of Customer Training: 5 Experts Share Their Tips
Raven360 Team : September 30, 2021
Customer training allows SaaS and technology businesses to educate their users on how to excel with their products. Capable of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones, education efforts are a valuable piece to any product’s strategic plan.
Beyond the daunting task of developing a program, customer training teams face two main challenges: getting a seat at the table and proving the value of customer education. Neither a small task nor the two can directly impact the long-term success of a customer training team.
In this article, our five experts will share their top tips for developing customer training programs, advocating for customer education, and proving a program’s impact on a business and its profits.
An Overview of Customer Training
Customer training is the process of educating consumers to utilize a product or service successfully. Standard in the SaaS and tech industries, customer training, helps companies attract consumers and grow brand experts through intentionally designed learning opportunities. Often taking the form of courses, FAQs, demos, or guided efforts, learning academies differ in appearance and execution by company and product.
The core benefit of Customer Training is the ability to assure customers they will become experts in a product. With additional benefits like increased user engagement and revenue, Customer Training directly impacts a product's success. A well-developed customer education program can be critical in growing clientele in marketplaces saturated with products and solutions.
Donna Webber
President, Customer Onboarding Leader, Springboard Solutions
Principal, KickStart Alliance
Author of Onboarding Matters
Listen to Donna on the TLG Podcast: The Direct Impact of Training on Growth
1. Track your efforts.
You can get started with whatever tool is at hand; a spreadsheet will do. It is important to track the activities you and your team perform to help customers be successful. Then document what your team spends time on. You want to understand how long customer-facing activities take and how many touch points customers need to reach milestones. This helps you know what efforts are working and where to invest.
2. Measure what matters.
Don’t wait for a data analyst. Instead, start measuring your impact. First, understand what truly matters to your executives and the board. Is there one metric that drives the company? It might be annual contract value (ACV), annual recurring revenue (ARR), product usage, or lifetime value (LTV).
Next, explore how your efforts impact that master metric. Dig into existing systems to uncover influence. Don’t waste time proving causation or waiting a year to show higher renewals from onboarded customers. Instead, explore leading indicators like product usage, net promoter score (NPS), customer health score, and customer engagement metrics.
A colleague of mine wanted to understand the effect of his customer enablement programs on customers, so spreadsheet in hand, he manually worked his way through Salesforce to compare companies that benefited from his services and those that did not. He uncovered data that showed enabled customers buy eight times more software than customers who don’t.
3. Grab the Table’s Attention
Don’t wait for others to notice. Instead, think like a business owner. This means delivering your customer enablement programs and marketing and selling your value to both customers and internal teams.
When I work with companies, we create a go-to-market plan that defines how to advertise customer-facing programs and offerings, even if they are ‘free.’ Including external and internal marketing and selling strategies in the go-to-market plan is essential. Let internal teams and leaders know where you fit in and what you are up to. Making one big announcement isn’t enough. Instead, I like the ‘drip-feed’ approach with regular outreach to internal teams.
I recommend sending monthly internal newsletters to share benefits, trends, use cases, and the influence the team has on customers. Join sales calls regularly to keep sales reps current with how you make their lives easier and their deals larger. Work with Marketing teams to create collateral for customer-facing teams to leverage.
Debbie Smith
Senior Manager Smartsheet University, Smartsheet
Vice President, CEdMA
Listen to Debbie on the TLG Podcast:
How to Get a Seat at The Table When in Customer Education
1. Proving the Value of Customer Training to Other Departments
Unlike other departments, customer success isn’t typically one that needs to be proven the value of education; customer success already understands that customers need to be trained. Usually, “the relationship with them is [built on if we can] create the content they want fast enough and if we are creating the type of content they want.” Both departments typically move smoothly as long as customer training works in unison with customer success.
Customer success leadership is slightly different: their perspective depends on their KPIs. Training managers must prove the value of customer education by providing success metrics - often those that reflect leadership’s KPIs. An inability to show tangible results will make it difficult to gain the trust of leadership members or even earn a seat.
2. Convincing Execs to Invest in Customer Training
To convince executives of the value of customer training, teams should present high-level data through executive-level dashboards. The proposed metrics should be clear and easy to understand, with more summaries than in-depth information. Executives “don't want to see all of the graphs; they want to know what percentage of customers are trained and if that is affecting ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).”
When presenting to leadership, these dashboards should be included in the PowerPoint deck. Doing so creates a unified report for the executive team to drill into. By giving an overview and relevant data, executives can make a better-informed decision regarding customer success efforts; the better the evidence of the strengths of customer training is, the more likely executives will invest.
3. Proving Value through Key Performance Indicators
Many key performance indicators can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of customer training programs. Two are penetration metrics and impact metrics.
Penetration metrics help identify what customers should be targeted by marketing. By observing this KPI, managers can see how segments (executive level, SMBs, SMEs) engage with a product. From there, future marketing strategies can be developed based on goals for a segment.
For example, marketing will be adjusted if we find more people on an enterprise level who use a product than on the SMB level. If we “need more people in SMB to start getting involved, then those penetration KPIs tell [us] whom to send marketing to.” Alternatively, if the desire was to attract executive-level users, marketing efforts may be changed to focus on growing the executive-level user base more extensively.
Impact metrics help show the value of a company and its courses. When observing different courses, impact metrics can help identify which are more valuable to consumers. Using this information, teams can promote that course further. Similarly, impact metrics can expose areas of improvement for customer training teams, including identifying courses that need to be developed or updated.
Kinda Nehlawi
Customer Training and Documentation Specialist, Diligent Corporation
LMS Manager, Blue House Energy
1. Gather Customer Feedback
Talking to customers and gathering their insight, whether by simple phone calls, surveys, or formal interviews, can go a long way, especially when building a program. Testing early and iterating, taking an agile approach, and not necessarily aiming for perfection. Finding out what customers need and how they prefer to learn is key.
Working within the LMS space for a few years, I’ve also learned (from my former customers) that it can be tempting to go ahead and purchase a great LMS or other costly learning tools, spend hundreds of hours building a polished online course, but later learn that your customer only needed a quick one-page cheat sheet to achieve their goal.
I used to help SMEs sell their courses online, so my advice was always to start small, iterate, and improve as they go.
2. Prove the Success of Your Program
When thinking about how to prove training grows your business: CEd folks are continuously learning to make data-informed decisions and to work with the resources they have in order to prove value.
With that said, before requesting to spend on a new tool, show that customers who have attended training or view videos or read help guides are more successful. Gather their qualitative feedback - did they find the sessions helpful? Were they impressed with the training team or content?
Relaying that type of information can certainly help build a case when speaking with key internal stakeholders. Figure out who’s trained and who isn’t, and show how that is correlated with customer retention (which isn’t always an easy task).
3. Collaboration is Key
Be collaborative: CEd should touch on the full Customer Journey: I work closely with CS, product, support, and even sales to gather a fuller story. Product teams have excellent user research info that CEd can utilize. Data teams may have strong tools that CEd can burrow or tap into to make more informed decisions and show value.
Caryn Morgan
Owner, OrionCat LLC
1. Teach ‘Em to Fish
Anytime you are able to save people hours upon hours of work, or when you can get someone to think about a problem differently, you save the company money and increase employee engagement.
In my 20 years in the Alarm Monitoring software development industry, I found if you "teach 'em to fish," they are more likely to find efficiencies that save time, effort, and money. When my customers applied what they learned, they were able to gain time, reduce stressors, and improve customer satisfaction.
2. Stay Informed
Software is complex and constantly changing. What worked six months ago may not be the way it works today. Still understanding how the software works and why it benefits your business practices when it works properly helps you find creative solutions to customer challenges.
3. Take Value in Challenges
Learning is also challenging. Study after study has shown that when we make mistakes while learning, and when we instructors and designers provide challenges without spoon-feeding, learners take more from the experience and are able to apply more of what they learned.
Dave Derington
Co-Host, CELab
Senior Manager - Customer Education, Outreach
1. Define the Value of Customer Training
Early-phase SaaS organizations that are just beginning to scale their businesses (Series A, B, and C) often have a gap when it comes to helping customers learn the product. Early on, it's not uncommon to see Salespeople, Customer Success Managers, and Professional Services teams leading training sessions - because they have no other options.
Customers have all kinds of questions, and this kind of training tends to emerge out of necessity.
The immediate "value" comes from two things:
- You have more time to do your job (not train customers)
- Customer Education teams can scale training (e.g., it becomes 1: Many)
2. Find Solutions to Determine ROI
Measuring ROI at the Business level is more complicated than simply pulling LMS data.
Determining ROI quantitatively presumes that:
- You have product telemetry or usage data (like WAUs or MAUs - weekly or monthly active users)
- You have data on your learners from an LMS, Credentialing system, or even Certification platform (maybe other sources like surveys)
- And finally - you can "join" or relate that data.
In order to find the business-level ROI of customer training, compare course data within the learning academy and within a platform like Tableau or PowerBI. If there is a correlation, you can show that there is an impact. Typically you can compare accounts who did have training vs. ones that didn't and see - in aggregate - how you impacted adoption (or whatever metric you're looking at).
3. Do more with less money - Convincing Executives
As an example, in one organization, I realized that both CSMs and Professional Services teams were delivering training. After tracking the two, I realized that our teams were doing thousands of hours of redundant training. I brought this to my executives’ attention.
By identifying a problem (a loss of money due to redundancy) and using relevant KPIs, I was able to demonstrate customer education as a valuable solution.
Do more with less and save money? That's enough to convince any rational Executive!
Track the Right Metrics
There are probably many different metrics you could be tracking, but here are some …
- Registrations & Completions
- Credentials issued
- Certifications obtained
- CSAT for Trainers (VILT)
- CSAT for On-Demand Content
- Time to complete content
Conclusion
Along with the development challenges, customer training departments often face two main hurdles: proving their program’s value and getting the opportunity to advocate for it.
When it comes to proving value, companies should utilize key performance indicators to show a tangible impact on profitability; managers should look to establish a correlation between their metrics and overall profitability. By demonstrating an effect on revenue, teams can prove the value of customer education.
To earn a seat at the table, our experts suggest being proactive and not just waiting for an invitation. Teams should actively promote their upcoming projects, completed products, and tangible results. For some, this may come in the form of internal newsletters; for others, this may be by collaborating with other departments. Regardless of the method, experts consistently suggest making customer education visible within the company.
With no two products or companies the same, there’s no one ‘best way’ to build a customer training program. Still, we’re thankful for our experts’ contributions and the insight they provided for us.
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